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Dutch Hotels Must Register As ISPs
hankwang writes "The Dutch telecommunications authority OPTA has announced that Dutch hotels must register as internet providers (original version, in Dutch) because that is what they formally are, according to Dutch laws. It is well possible that once hotels are officially internet providers, they will also have to abide by the European regulations on data retention and make efforts to link email headers and other data traffic to individual hotel guests. Could this also happen in other European countries? This is probably not likely to lead to a more widespread adoption of free WiFi services in hotels."
This is probably not likely to lead to a more widespread adoption of free WiFi services in hotels.
Now, since when is it in the core competence of a hotel to provide IT services?
Never.
Sure, have it available, provide it as a service to guests, but the hotels themselves don't offer the service, they outsource. Just like they do with the water, telephones, power, and everything else. If you actually LOOK at the default home page that your average hotel provides, you'll find a logo in the corner someplace indicating who the real service provider is. Hint: it's never the hotel unless it's some ratty shathole where the owner tries to save a few bucks by buying a couple of routers at the local Best Buy and sneaking a consumer DSL line.
In any real sense, this will have almost no effect on hotels with 3 or more stars. It might have some impact on the cheap independents.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The majority of the guests are not going to use the borrow the SMTP server that the hotel uses.
They are typically going to HTTPS to some webmail account.
Good luck getting the headers out of that.
If the hotel has a NAT-ted network, what are they supposed to log? Which 192.168.x.y address had a particular evil-doing port number at a particular time, and match that t a guest?
Europeans are going daft.